Report: Corps’ timeline shows change may start in fall of 2015

The Marine Corps is gunning for perhaps the biggest sea change in its nearly 238-year history — allowing women to serve as infantry beginning fall of 2015.

The proposal was included in the service’s timeline for integrating female troops into all military jobs released Tuesday by the Defense Department.

Each of the four Pentagon armed forces as well as special operations command were required to outline their plans in May to eliminate gender restrictions barring women from direct ground combat jobs by 2016.

Another bombshell included in the reports was a plan to accept women into the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. Women are expected to encounter a particularly tough reception in those elite units regularly engaged in close-quarters combat, but they comprise a small part of the military.

Among the conventional armed forces, the Marine Corps is most dominated by its infantry, making the service younger and more male than its counterparts. Under Marine Corps doctrine, all Marine units support the infantry. And every Marine is trained to serve as an infantryman, according to the service’s “every Marine a rifleman” ethos. Even the cooks and piccolo players.

“The infantry is the Marine Corps. This is huge news,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, a former Marine artillery officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is a big shock to Marine Corps culture and history. We will see if it works.”

In one of his last acts as defense secretary in January, Leon Panetta rescinded the Defense Department’s 1994 combat exclusion policy barring women from front-line, direct ground combat units. The policy defined which jobs remained closed to women as the military opened air combat and most battleship assignments to them in the early 1990s.

In announcing the plans, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said the onus would be on the services to prove why an exception keeping a particular job closed to women was warranted.

Now the services have an escape hatch as they continue to research the implications of integrating women into units such as the infantry and special operations forces with rigorous physical requirements.

The primary research and preparation phase examining injury rates, unit cohesion, berthing issues and other factors, continues for the Marine Corps through 2013. Then the commandant of the Marine Corps will recommend which jobs, if any, should remain all male.

The Corps will continue to analyze the data in three phases over the next three years.

“The deliberate methodology we are employing is to ensure we do this right. ‘Right’ means we maintain combat-effective units across the total force and we don’t set our female Marines up for failure by not preparing them for any resultant institutional change,” said Capt. Maureen Krebs, a spokeswoman for the Marine Corps.

In the Marine report signed by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus on May 2, the service details plans for opening a total of 54,000 active-duty and 16,000 reserve billets reserved for men.

As it stands, 32 primary job categories out of 335 in the Marine Corps are closed to women, in addition to 16 other job categories.

Of those, the largest category by far includes the infantry, followed by artillery and combat engineers. Among the 34,783 active-duty Marine positions in primary job categories closed to women, 25,659 fall in the infantry, including rifleman, machine-gunner and mortar man.

The Army, by comparison, which is more than five times the size of the Marine Corps, is opening 61,255 infantry positions to women among its active-duty, guard and reserve forces.

The first Marine jobs opening to women under the new plan are for officers in the ground intelligence field, a position already filled by women in the Army. By this month, the Corps expects to open an initial batch of 92 of those jobs to female officers.

Other jobs will open to women in phases after physical standards are set for each, officer and senior noncommissioned officers are recruited and trained and Congress notified. The infantry field will be the last under the current timeline.

“All dates for planning openings are estimates; they are contingent upon recommendations made by the (commandant of the Marine Corps), informed by thorough research and analysis conducted throughout the preparation phase of this implementation plan,” the Marine timeline states.

Looking ahead, politicians and military leaders said many questions remain. If the last gender-based restrictions for serving in the military fade away, will every American woman be required to register for the selective service? Will female Marines get to choose whether to join the infantry, unlike men?

Hunter has been a vocal opponent of accepting women into the ground combat arms, saying it would reduce the fighting effectiveness of combat units. He criticized the president for introducing what he characterized as a chaotic change while the nation should be focused on countering the roadside bomb threat stalking its troops in Afghanistan.

Now that the change seems inevitable, “it’s all about the implementation and how it goes,” Hunter said.

“As long as they don’t lower standards, I guess that is all we can hope for right now to accommodate different genders in the military.”

To that end, the House defense bill passed Friday includes a provision introduced by Hunter dictating gender-neutral standards for military jobs.

The Marine plan released Tuesday states: “as our Corps moves forward with this process, our focus will remain on combat readiness and generating combat-ready units while simultaneously ensuring the opportunity for every Marine to realize his/her potential.”

As part of its research and preparation, since April 2012 the Corps has offered 161 female lieutenants in basic officer training the chance to attempt the infantry officer course at Quantico, Va. Four accepted the challenge, none passed.

A group of five female volunteers slated for the course beginning in July has shrunk to two, according to the commanding officer of The Basic School. U-T San Diego is scheduled to cover the combat endurance test, the long first day of training when the previous two females washed out.

The Corps may have better luck getting women to qualify for the infantry among its much larger pool of enlisted females.

“In the enlisted ranks, I think quite a few women will go and they will be able to do it physically,” Hunter said.